Email Marketing Metrics Report

Open Rates

October 2015 Edition

Open rate measures the number of recipients who opened or viewed messages within a campaign. To determine open rate, the email sender will add a small, transparent image to each message. When the message is opened and images are downloaded, an open is recorded.

Not all email clients download images by default. If a recipient opens a message without ever enabling images, an open will not be recorded. This can result in open rates that are lower than what they truly are. While open rate is not 100% accurate, it still provides a good approximation of campaign performance.

Calculating an open rate: The open rate of an email campaign is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of delivered messages. The resulting value is then represented as a percentage.

Open Rates Trend

As in 2013, open rates were slightly higher during the first half of the year. For H1 of 2014, they averaged 11.9%, and for H2 of 2014 they averaged 11.3%. Both halves performed slightly better than their 2013 counterparts, with an increase of 0.3 percentage points for H1 and 0.1 percentage points for H2.

Average Open Rate Over the Past Ten Halves

Average Open Rate by Industry

Museums and Galleries (24.9%) and Manufacturing and Distribution (24%) produced the highest average open rates — similar to their performance last year. Arts and Crafts (20.3%) also continued to perform well, keeping its third-place spot from 2013. The lowest average open rates occurred for Hobbies (3%), Accounting and Finance (5.2%), and Government and Politics (5.6%). While no longer in the bottom three, Recruitment and Staffing still scored one of the lowest average open rates of 7.8%.

Average Open Rate by Industry

Stabilization (Cumulative)

The figure below demonstrates the percentage of total opens that occurred each hour within the first 48 hours following message delivery. As was the case in 2013, the most opens (12.5%) occurred at the one-hour mark. By the 10th hour, only 2.1% of total opens occurred, and by the 15th hour, just 1.2% occurred. Only 0.5% of the total message opens occurred at the 24-hour mark, after which they steadily decreased.

Percentage of Total Opens Per Hour After Delivery

The graph below represents the cumulative percentage of opens over time. In other words, it illustrates how many of the total opens had occurred by each hour after delivery.

As we have previously observed, the majority of opens took place within the first few hours after the message was delivered. Just over half of all opens (51.4%) took place within the first five hours. After 15 hours, just under three-quarters (74.8%) were opened. It took slightly more than two days for 90% of the opens to occur, and around two weeks for nearly all of them to occur.